By Suzanne Adams
Well, where do I start? I guess we can start at the beginning of being in the military. It wasn’t something I had ever thought I would do but I wanted something stable, something long-term. I had gone to college but didn’t have a degree so my options of a decent job were limited. So I decided to join the Air Force and get some education and training. I chose a job that is very difficult to qualify for. I spent the first two years of my Air Force career in training and my first duty assignment was in South Korea. Unlike many overseas assignments, I was unable to bring my husband with me without applying for command sponsorship. He could have come and we could have paid out of pocket, but we have pets and he had a good job. Being an airman right out of tech school, we didn’t think we were going to get approved so we had planned to spend that year apart. We figured we had already waited that long (4 years) to start a family, what’s one more year?
Luckily, I got approved a few months after I arrived. My husband joined me here on Christmas Eve. We were ecstatic and since we knew we were going to be here for a while, decided to start trying for a family. We tried twice. It worked! I made jokes about being pregnant and little did I know I actually was! Fast forward to September 16, 2013. I’d had a relatively easy pregnancy. No morning sickness, no complications. The only thing that the doctors were ever concerned about was my weight (I gained about 50lbs) and that my blood pressure was always high. I went into labor on the 16th at around 5:30am. That was when I had my first contraction. I was admitted to the hospital around 2pm when my contractions were about 2 minutes apart. The doctor checked my cervix and I was 10cm dilated. He told me, “Good news, you’re ten cm dilated”. I looked at him and asked what the bad news was and his answer was, “You’re not getting an epidural”. I was fine with that because I had wanted a drug-free birth. Besides, I was already 10cm dilated so the baby was practically about to fall out, right? Wrong. At 5:30pm, my son had only progressed from -1 station to 0 station. The doctor was able to feel that every time I pushed (I had an epidural about 2 hours in), the baby’s head was hitting my pelvic bone. There was meconium in the water and his heart rate jumped up to almost 200. We discussed it and it was decided that a C-section was the way to go. I was devastated. I’d had all these hopes and dreams about how labor and delivery was going to be. I was going to push and the baby was going to come out and I was going to hold him and we would start our breastfeeding journey and everything would be rainbows and butterflies and harp music. HA! That’s about the furthest from what happened. I had to have a T-incision (bye-bye VBAC!!). My son had a bruise on his head from me pushing. I didn’t see him for almost 2 hours after he was delivered. I got wheeled into the room and the doctor says, “OK, he’s hungry, feed him!” Because breastfeeding is easy, right? Especially after giving birth. I tried for at least an hour to get my son to latch. My bra size was a 36G. My boob was literally larger than his head (it still is!). I also apparently had flat nipples. I called nurse after nurse to help. My husband was trying to help. The lactation consultant was not in the country. After him screaming and my failed attempts at getting him to latch for two hours, I gave in and gave him formula. I have never cried so hard in my life (I’m actually crying as I write this). Not only did I fail at giving birth, I failed at breastfeeding. What kind of woman was I?! These are the things that are supposed to come naturally to us. How was I going to raise this baby if I couldn’t even bring him into the world or feed him properly?? What no one told me is that all of this is HARD WORK.
I stayed in the hospital for 4 days and went home on a Thursday night. On the way home, I started texting a lactation consultant at our base (I gave birth at a different base than the one I was stationed at, about an hour away). She said to me, “Please let me come over tomorrow and help”. I agreed and she came over the next day around lunchtime. After a few hours, we found that I needed to do either the football hold or the cross-cradle hold and that I was going to use a nipple shield to try to draw my nipple out. He’d been using a bottle for a few days anyway so he was used to the silicone. She also “diagnosed” him with the baby equivalent of PTSD. It had been a rough birth and a rough few days. When we were at the hospital, every time they took him, they did something to him. Whether it be an exam, bloodwork, whatever. Every time he woke up, he freaked out and would scream and flail because he was expecting someone to hurt him. His eyebrows were constantly furrowed and he always looked mad. Trying to calm him down was impossible. Trying to get him to latch during one of his freak-outs was also impossible. We eventually got a routine down. By routine, I mean I sat on the couch topless for a week and nursed him on demand. He eventually started to calm down. That’s when my little angry baby started to disappear. He started to relax with me and my husband and I could see his already stubborn little personality start to form.
I had to go back to work at 6 weeks and that’s when (in my eyes), the real test began. I had to start pumping. Oh, I hate pumping so much. It’s time consuming, it’s boring, it’s more painful than breastfeeding. There are regulations that protect me and my right to pump. That being said, it took some explaining. Many of the people that I work with are young, single men with no children. I tried to be as subtle as I could: “I’ll be back in a little bit” or “I need to go take care of stuff”. Without fail, they always asked what I was doing, where I was going, when I would be back. Explaining pumping became the highlight of my day. For whatever reason, they always got grossed out when I talked about it. After a month or so, people stopped asking questions. So I fell into the routine of pumping every few hours at work, bringing home the milk and nursing on demand when I was home. I tried a few times to wean him from the nipple shield but it never really worked out. Nipple confusion had long since set in. It was more important to me that he be able to take a bottle of pumped milk while I was working, so I never pushed the issue. He just turned one year old and we are still going strong. He doesn’t really like to nurse during the day, but that’s understandable. It’s him and daddy time during the day, while I am at work. My days off are almost like an inconvenience to him, lol. I disrupt their routine. Night time though… That’s another story. Once it hits a certain time of day, he’s allllllll momma’s boy. Some people at work have asked when I plan to wean and my answer is always, “When he’s ready”. When I was pregnant, I had all the ideas about how I was going to raise my baby. I had a friend who did attachment parenting, nursing on demand, bed sharing. I thought she was out of her mind. “No way is my baby going to sleep in bed with me. He’s going to be in his own bed, in his own room. He’s going to be on a sleep schedule and I’m going to let him cry it out. He’s going to have to learn one day.” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. I now do all of the above. The only thing that we never got into was baby wearing. He’s been active from the beginning and likes to explore. I tried a few different carriers and he will only let me use them for short periods of time. Anyway, thanks for listening. Being in the military and a breastfeeding mom is such a challenge but I wouldn’t change a bit of it. I always likened having a newborn to basic training: you get no sleep and when you are awake, someone is always yelling at you.
